In it, he explains that in order for work to work, there also must be rest:

“Rest is not this optional leftover activity.

Work and rest are actually partners. They are like different parts of a wave. You can’t have the high without the low.

The better you are at resting, the better you will be at working.”

Sure, if you work for a longer period of time you’re bound to produce more results. But “production” doesn’t always equate to “productivity.” Especially not the sustainable and repeatable kind you want at your company.

Both my personal experiences and 13 years of building JotForm, have taught me that once you learn to balance work with restorative rest — your productivity will skyrocket.

Think about it this way: If you’re on the road driving a vehicle for hours on end without rest, eventually you’ll get tired. Your eyelids will sag. You will begin to swerve.

You’ll be a menace to society.

While less life-threatening in most instances, working without rest will cause you to make just as many unnecessary mistakes.

You’ll be a menace to productivity.

Even the most productive mind needs time to recharge.

In Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, brilliant thinker and writer Maya Angelou described setting aside a specific block of time to write every day. After that, she put work aside to enjoy “a semblance of a normal life” with her family until the next day.

Billionaire founder of the Virgin Group Richard Branson rises early to exercise and enjoy time with his family.

And Bill Gates, who is widely considered one of the richest people alive, makes time to read an average of one book every single week.

“Still, reading books is my favourite way to learn about a new topic. I’ve been reading about a book a week on average since I was a kid. Even when my schedule is out of control, I carve out a lot of time for reading.”

After a full month, week, or even day of really concentrated work without any restorative rest, it’s hard to come up with any new ideas.

If you are able to force an idea out, it’s likely to be full of mistakes. Mistakes you’re less equipped to spot or correct with your tired and overworked brain.

I’ve seen plenty of brilliant minds in time-crunched, high-stress situations come up with overly-complicated results disguised as solutions. That’s because, as Steve Jobs brought to the public consciousness, simplicity is often harder to achieve than complexity.

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.”

Simplicity takes a lot of smart and hard thinking.

Smart and hard thinking is something a rest-deprived mind cannot do.

Restorative rest is not easy.

Letting my mind and body turn to mush while watching television every night after work would be easy.

It takes discipline to resist the mindless email checking and Slack messaging that can unconsciously eat up hours of your downtime and keep your mind wound up.

That’s why I’ve cultivated simple habits that allow the “work” part of my mind to take a break while the “play” part comes out to, well, play.

I train at the gym, I read books to gain a new perspective, I get outside with my wife and young kids.

The pressure of limited time gives us a little push to complete as much quality work as we can right up until the time we’ve set aside for a mental break.

I instituted this system of alternating heavy and light work after I observed “negative work” happening within the JotForm team.

After too many hours caught up on the same tough problem, programmers started to notice more bugs popping up in their code. Too many hours staring at a screen had designers coming up with dull and less-than-friendly workflows.

Our valiant efforts to muscle through a problem, no matter how long it took, were backfiring.

We were spending twice as long completing the same amount of work because our thought process was lagging and we kept having to go back and do things again.

The way your brain, and our organization, functions isn’t unlike a muscle.

Working the same muscle every single day without rest is likely to result in injury. Not only will that stop your fitness progress dead in its tracks, it might even send you spiraling backward as you take time off from training to recover.

That regular at your gym who can squat over 200 pounds doesn’t do that every day. It took them months, if not years, of alternating training with rest to grow their muscles to where they are today.

Taking a break isn’t lazy. It isn’t the result of lacking persistence. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

The hard thing is actually taking the time to listen and respond to your brain and body when they’re begging for some restorative rest.

Pausing with intention is a strength, not a weakness.

2. Take a break, or you will break.

Emails sent at 3 a.m.

Casual references to taking care of a task over the weekend.

You might think these are things I love to hear my team say. It must mean they’re committed to their jobs. It must show they love what they do.

While those things may both be true, it could also mean they’re on the short road to burn out.

That’s not only bad for them personally; it’s expensive for us as a company to have to start from scratch with finding, interviewing, onboarding, and training a new employee to fill their shoes.

When your employees get in a flow, sometimes it can be hard for them to turn off. And since our team is distributed all over the globe, it can be especially difficult when they know someone is just an instant message no matter what time it is.

As crazy as it sounds, sustainable work hours aren’t just something I encourage — they’re something I sometimes have to enforce at JotForm.

When I see signs that someone is working outside of what I dub “sane” hours, I remind them to take a break. The problem will still be there tomorrow, and the solution will be even better with a fresh mind.

Like sustainable growth, sane and reasonable work hours organically became part of JotForm’s core culture from the very beginning.

This system ensures we’re as focused and productive as possible during the hours we spend at work.

When we’re more productive at work, we don’t feel guilty about leaving work in the office when it comes time to break for the night or weekend.

That leads to more restorative downtime and fresh, excited minds on Monday morning.

3. Make sure rest is well defined.

Unlimited PTO (personal time off) is a common benefit at many modern tech companies. Not at JotForm.

It’s not because I think my employees don’t deserve time off. By now, you should know how important I believe rest is for productivity.

It’s because I’ve learned that, like creativity, relaxation is at its most powerful when it’s well defined.

“What we found was that by setting specific parameters around the number of days, there was no question about how much time was appropriate to take from work to engage in personal, creative, andfamily activities.”

In 2014, a Glassdoor survey uncovered that American employees only take half their vacation days. What’s worse is over half of them are still working during those “off” days.

I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to bet those numbers have only gone up.

At JotForm, we put some healthy pressure on employees to use their vacation days every year.

And because they’re well-defined, we believe it encourages them to actually use the days to rest, recharge, and come back more productive than ever.

Remember that exhausting all-nighter you pulled in university; banging away at your keyboard until your hardly-coherent research paper reached the minimum length? It wasn’t your best work, but it passed.

How about that time you spent an 80-hour-week in the office wrapping up a design project? It wasn’t your most creative design, but it was ready by the deadline.

You worked hard. You worked long. But how much of that work would you call productive?

I’m willing to bet only a small percentage of it.

I’m willing to bet you could have done better.

Not by developing new skills. Not by working even more. But by working less.

Restorative rest is not an option, it is a requirement for any person who wants to be more productive in their life and in their business.

Aytekin Tank is the Founder and CEO of JotForm. A developer by trade but a storyteller by heart, he writes about his journey as an entrepreneur and shares advice for other startups. He loves to hear from JotForm users.